Moving Palestinians from Gaza to Sinai

According to a write up published in The Jerusalem Post, moving Palestinians to the Sinai Peninsula has been termed the ideal solution to resolve Gaza crisis.

The writer believes, the Sinai Peninsula comprises one of the most suitable places on Earth to provide the people of Gaza with hope and a peaceful future.

The 365 km² Gaza Strip has remained a flash point in Israel-Egypt relations since its conquest by the Egyptian Army in 1948 as part of Egypt’s failed attempt to annihilate the newly-born State of Israel.

Egypt invaded Israel along two main axes, reaching the outskirts of Jerusalem and only 20 km. short of Tel Aviv, but the Israel Defense Forces pushed off this offensive. These battles generated a wave of refugees that found haven in the Gaza Strip, which remained under Egyptian military control until 1967.

Since 1948, and up until the current partial release of some of the Israeli babies, children, and women taken hostage by Hamas terrorists, the Egyptians have been significantly involved in the politics and economy of the Gaza Strip.

The Egyptians locked the residents of Gaza and the refugees of the 1948 War in the Gaza Strip, and, with the backing of the United Nations, still deny them the right to rebuild their lives in all Arab countries, including in the adjacent Sinai Peninsula of Egypt. This harsh policy was one of the major and long-term catalysts for the intensifying human stagnation of now circa 1.8 million inhabitants within the Strip.

According to the writer, beyond the abduction, mutilation, burning, rape, and murder of 1,200 Israelis and other nationals, the Hamas terrorist invasion of Israel on October 07 destroyed many Israeli agricultural villages. This barbarian murder-fest led the IDF to conquer the northern Gaza Strip and the Hamas-infested Gaza metropolis as part of Israel’s goal to destroy Hamas terror capabilities. As civilians were ordered to move south, the southern Gaza Strip became a haven for most of Gaza’s residents.

The battles in the northern Strip generated significant damage and destruction of buildings utilized by Hamas. Damage to the immense terror-tunnel system further destabilized the metropolis’s substrate. Major portions of the metropolis are considerably incapacitated and cannot be simply fixed. Rather, the damaged and destroyed structures must be completely torn down. The tunneled – and consequently exploded and bulldozed – soil must undergo extensive environmental and engineering rehabilitation.

In other words, the metropolis has to be fully evacuated, redesigned, monitored, and only then rebuilt to provide habitable and economic conducive conditions. Such an effort requires unique expertise and immense funding and will take considerable time that cannot be calculated.

Therefore, the war is anticipated to end with a unique humanitarian challenge of how to construct a better future for the people of Gaza.

Since Israel’s unconditional turnover of the Gaza Strip to the Palestinian Authority in 2005, Gazans have completely failed to generate a productive Palestinian-administered entity, despite generous economic support, mainly from America, Europe, Qatar, and the UN.

This may be associated with the coupled effect of an intrinsic hatred-focused, fanatic, anti-Israel Islamic culture, and links with Iran, along with limited geographical conditions, poor natural and human resources, and a high population density.

This situation raises serious doubts that any type of future self-sustainable efforts will yield a stable and free socioeconomic culture and promising future in the Strip. A creative solution is needed ASAP.

The adjoining Sinai Peninsula, in essence, is the exact opposite of the Gaza Strip, comprising one of the most suitable places on Earth to provide the people of Gaza with hope and a peaceful future.

Covering 60,000 km² (165 times larger than the Strip), its population is barely around one-third of Gaza’s, making it one of the emptiest places in the Mediterranean region.

Although under Egyptian governance, it is an integral geographic-geological continuation of Israel and the Gaza Strip, with which it shares a 200 km. and 14 km. long border, respectively.

Therefore, the geographic setting of the Mediterranean coast of northern Sinai is also a physical continuation of the Gaza Strip with ample, shallow groundwater in the northeast.

Due to the intensive smuggling of arms to Hamas via Sinai in the last few years, Egypt fully destroyed the residential infrastructure bordering the Gaza Strip, and expelled the local population.

In northwestern Sinai, Egypt has invested immensely in building for agriculture, including freshwater canals.

Furthermore, Egypt has surprisingly wired Sinai with excellent infrastructure, overshooting its civilian and industrial needs. These include an array of paved roads and highways connected by tunnels beneath the Suez Canal to mainland Egypt.

The facts demonstrate that the northern Sinai Peninsula is an ideal location to develop a spacious resettlement for the people of Gaza. Its open areas, along with the existing infrastructure, can easily host large-scale development projects that, if led by the Chinese and supported by local labor, for example, can easily mature in just one to two years.

Firm American and international guidance lined with financial and operative support can surely pave the way to this creative and prosperous solution and jointly help Egypt’s dire demographic and economic situation that is challenging its political authority.

Israel will also be cooperative in sharing its hi-tech-oriented agricultural capabilities with Egypt as it did following the Peace Treaty in the early 1980s.

If Egypt bravely chooses to change its rigid, old-fashioned policy of keeping Palestinian Gazans in constant distress and consents to such an endeavor, its geopolitical gains will be threefold: It will be hailed by the international community as the savior of the dire plight of Gazans; it will strengthen its status as a leader of the Arab world; and it will finally fulfill its 30+-year-old plan to settle the Sinai and strengthen its control of this zone.

However, history has taught us that Gazans, despite their complaints about their humanitarian situation, may object towards genuine rehabilitation programs. This stubbornness substantially relies on their desire to destroy Israel, which repeatedly comes at their own expense.

The ongoing obliteration of Hamas, which terrorizes Palestinian Authority officials and many Gaza residents, may pave the way to the emergence of the proposed Sinai solution, if presented in a wise and discrete manner that conforms to the Middle East mentality.

 

 

Egypt consolidates grip on northern Sinai

According to a The Jerusalem Post report, the Egyptian military has secured large areas of the strategic stretch of land bordering Palestinian-run Gaza and Israel on one side and the Suez Canal on the other. 

It is no longer on the back foot, witnesses, security sources and analysts say. Civilian life is still severely curtailed but the long-neglected region is changing as the state forges ahead with development schemes.

Many of the militants have been killed, fled or surrendered. Around 200 are still active, down from 400 two years ago and 800 in 2017, according to three Egyptian security sources.

On the outskirts of North Sinai's main city Al Arish, near where razed olive farms once stood, the government has built new apartment blocks.

A resident said people just sought a return to normality.

"We've had enough," said the man in his 50s, declining to be named. "We want to return to our houses or even the new ones they are building. We want to live in peace again."

Unrest roiled northern Sinai following the uprising in Egypt against Hosni Mubarak in 2011, escalating after the army overthrew President Mohamed Mursi.

In November 2017, the Islamic State-affiliated militant group Sinai Province claimed the most lethal attack in Egypt's modern history, which killed more than 300 people at a North Sinai mosque, as well as an assassination attempt against the defense and interior ministers at Al Arish military airport.

The military started an operation in response in February 2018 and now appears to be in its strongest position in North Sinai - the only area in Egypt where there is regular militant activity - for at least a decade.

The security presence in southern Sinai, a popular tourist destination, has also been reinforced and some international travel warnings scaled back.

At Sinai's northeastern point at Rafah and along the border with Gaza, a buffer zone has been created on cleared land, monitored by dozens of Egyptian watchtowers.

In its most recent statement on North Sinai, the Egyptian military said 89 suspected militants had been killed in an undefined period over recent months, against eight casualties from its own ranks.

There has been a "continuous and significant decline" in the number of attacks over the past three to four years, with approximately 17 recorded shooting attacks and 39 bomb attacks so far this year compared to 166 and 187 respectively in 2017, security analyst Oded Berkowitz said.

Sinai Province's capability has also been eroded by the squeezing of supply lines and recruitment from Gaza due in part to deteriorating relations with Palestinian factions there, and the hostility from Sinai residents, Berkowitz said.

Though, estimating militant numbers is hard, recent death notices suggest those still active are mostly Egyptian and Palestinians from Gaza, while previously they included foreign fighters from the Caucuses and Saudi Arabia, he said.

Near Bir al-Abd, where militants occupied a group of villages for weeks in the summer of 2020, masked gunmen stormed a café where Salem al-Sayed was watching football in September, kidnapping him and seven others and accusing them of cooperating with the military.

"They put us in a closed place so we could not hear anything, not even the sound of the wind," the 35-year-old told Reuters. After four days with their hands bound and blindfolded, they were freed by the military in a raid, Sayed said.

President Abdel Fattah al-Sisi, who as Army Chief ousted Mursi in 2013, says developing Sinai is a priority.

"We will not leave any land that can be developed in Sinai until we make it grow," he said this month at an event to mark the 1973 war with Israel on the peninsula.

Last month in northwestern Sinai, Sisi inaugurated a US$1.3 billion agricultural wastewater plant to help reclaim land for farming.

The government recently announced a plan for 17 agricultural and residential development clusters across Sinai, 10 of them in the north. It says it is allocating modern and traditional homes for those displaced.

Access and international cooperation development remain limited, however. Demolitions and other restrictions linked to military operations have triggered complaints from some residents and rights groups.

State infrastructure projects and housing developments seem beyond local needs and means, said Ahmed Salem of the London-based Sinai Foundation for Human Rights.

The effective siege in north-eastern Sinai has restricted much economic activity, he said.

"They (both sides) destroyed Al Arish, which used to be one of the most beautiful tourist places in Egypt. Nowhere else you could see such sandy beaches," said one middle-aged resident.

"We don't support Islamic State, but many Sinai residents, from Rafah to Al Arish, were dealt with unjustly and paid a heavy price after doing nothing wrong," he said.